Chapter 2

The howling gale carried a highly corrosive black sand, scraping against our gas masks like thousands of tiny iron files.

We plunged headfirst into the wasteland night outside Black Iron Town.

Behind us, on the towering scrap-metal walls, blinding searchlights flared to life. Sirens wailed like death tolls, tearing through the dead silence of the barren plains alongside the deafening roar of heavy diesel engines.

"The Mayor's mad dogs are coming after us!" Gail yelled, struggling through the knee-deep irradiated mud. He kept glancing back at the approaching headlights, his voice torn into fragments by the sandstorm.

"Shut up and save your breath!" I hauled Luke forward, his blood loss slowing him down, while my brain whirred like a highly precise, tightly wound clockwork machine.

This was a Category 3 Black Sandstorm, the deadliest disaster of the wasteland. Visibility was less than five meters, and the radioactive, acidic dust would scramble any standard thermal imaging. It was the perfect cover for our escape.

To shake off our pursuers completely, I led the team through extreme tactical maneuvers for the next twenty minutes.

We waded through pungent, toxic puddles, crossed a magnetic interference zone piled high with rusted iron, and even risked mutant beast attacks by zig-zagging back on ourselves three times along the leeward slopes of the dunes.

After three years of clawing for survival, I knew every crack and crevice of this wasteland intimately.

Even the Mayor's most sharp-nosed mutant hounds would completely lose our scent in this storm after those three directional shifts.

However, the survival instincts I prided myself on were pulverized the very next second.

Vrrrrrrrr——

Cutting through the deafening roar of the sandstorm, an eerie, bone-rattling rumble sharply pierced our eardrums—coming from dead-on our right flank.

That wasn't the exhaust sputter of Black Iron Town's junked-together pickup trucks. That was the low-frequency vibration unique to a heavily armored, high-performance off-road vehicle!

How was that possible?! Even with radar, they should be completely blind in this magnetic storm. How were they tracking us so flawlessly?!

"Take cover!!!"

Every hair on my body stood on end. Years of living on a knife-edge triggered an instinctual roar from my throat.

I viciously shoved Luke forward into the mud, throwing myself down like a stone into an abandoned crater.

The second we hit the dirt——

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat!

Two fiery streams of tracer rounds, thick as an infant’s arm, swept through the dust from behind like a Reaper’s meat grinder! It was heavy-caliber machine-gun suppressive fire!

The bullets plowed deep trenches into the sand, sending dirt and shrapnel-like stones flying in all directions.

"GAAAH!!!"

Luke only had one arm left and was already utterly exhausted. He was half a beat too slow.

A heavy-caliber round struck him squarely in the waist.

Flesh was as fragile as wet paper in that moment. I watched helplessly as the massive kinetic energy blew Luke's upper torso flying backward, while his lower half remained rooted in the mud.

A rain of blood and viscera smashed onto me, mixing with the howling wind.

He couldn't even finish his scream. The manic obsession in his eyes—his desperate belief that 'this world is fake'—instantly dissolved into a dead, staring puddle.

Of the five survivors from our community, another one was gone.

"Luke!!!" Gail's eyes went violently red. He roared, trying to scramble out of the crater.

"Get down!" I grabbed his tactical vest and brutally slammed him back into the muck. "He's already dead!"

"Help... Arthur... it hurts..."

A faint, broken sobbing drifted from the other side of the crater.

I whipped my head around, and my heart violently convulsed.

It was Elena.

During the barrage of crossfire, a stray bullet had ricocheted off a rock and pierced straight through her abdomen.

This female college student, who in our past life would tear up for half a day over a paper cut, was now staring in sheer horror as she clutched her stomach. Blackened intestines and blood stubbornly gushed through her trembling fingers.

"Elena can't die... We have to save her!" Marcus cowered in the blind spot of the rocks, shivering uncontrollably, his voice stuttering.

I crouched low, pressing myself flat against the muddy earth, and crawled to Elena's side.

One glance was all I needed to know she was beyond saving.

The shot had completely severed her bowels and main arteries. Even in peacetime, in a fully sterile ER, her chances would be slim to none. Let alone out here, bleeding into a radioactive wind tunnel.

"Arthur..." Elena gripped my hand with terrifying strength. Her fingers were as cold as ice.

Tears washed two streaks of clean skin down her dirt-covered face. "I don't want to die here... I want to go home... I want my mom..."

Looking into her dilating pupils, I didn't brutally pull away. Instead, I firmly squeezed her blood-soaked hand.

"Don't be afraid, Elena," I whispered into her ear, my voice as calm and steady as I could make it. "Just go to sleep. I will survive. I will find that door, and whatever is behind it, I swear I'll bring the rest of us home."

She looked at me, the corners of her mouth twitching as if trying to form a grateful smile. But in the next second, her pupils lost all focus, and the hand gripping mine fell limply into the mud.

I silently reached out my filthy hand and closed her unblinking eyes.

Over a hundred neighbors. Now, there were only three.

I released her hand, bowing my head, letting the acidic rain batter against my gas mask.

My capacity for grief had worn away over three years of slaughter. Now, all that filled my chest was a boiling, magma-like obsession.

That door.

Whether it was a pre-war ruin, or, as Luke had madly claimed, some mastermind treating us like reality TV monkeys...

It was our only hope of surviving, our only way out of this purgatory.

Whoever dared stand in my way, I would chop them to pieces.

Rumble——

The recon fire ahead temporarily ceased. The grinding of heavy armor treads came to a halt less than fifty meters from our position.

"Can't run anymore, can you, little rats?"

Through the peripheral glow of their searchlights, I saw four pursuers dismount.

They were clad in fully sealed ballistic armor, brandishing assault rifles fitted with night vision scopes. They were fanning out in a tactical formation, advancing toward our crater.

I narrowed my eyes in confusion. How did the town get their hands on such pristine heavy armor and night optics? Were they dug up from a new ruin?

There was no time to figure it out.

"Gail, Marcus," I dropped my voice to a lethal whisper. "Stay flat. Don't even breathe. Until I come back, neither of you lifts your heads."

Without waiting for their reply, I drew the tactical knife from my thigh—the blade sharpened to an icy edge—and clenched it between my teeth.

Using the apocalyptic black sandstorm as my cloak, I slithered out of the cover like an apex predator hugging the earth, completely silent.

The sandstorm was the wasteland’s most terrifying disaster, but to me, right now, the god-awful visibility and howling winds were the perfect banquet for slaughter.

Holding my breath, I circled wide, crawling up to the blind spot on the flank of the four heavy-armored trackers.

They wore night vision, but in a Category 3 magnetic sandstorm, the infrared of their thermal imagers would be scrambled into a chaotic mess of static.

Their greatest advantage had just become a blind man's cane.

"Dammit, lost their heat signatures. Be careful, these rats are cunning," the squad leader gestured forward.

At the exact moment the rearmost tracker turned his head—

I exploded upward from the mud!

My hands shot out like iron tongs, seizing the blind spot of his helmet from behind. My left hand clamped fiercely over his intake valve, while my right gripped the knife in reverse, driving it with ruthless, savage precision through the tiny gap between his helmet and the armored suit. I sank the blade straight into his cervical spine and twisted violently!

Shhhhk!

The blood didn't even have a chance to spray. Using my own massive momentum, I drove his entire body face-first into the mud.

Less than a second. Not a single sound was made.

I smoothly withdrew the blade and unclipped the two high-explosive fragmentation grenades from his belt.

"Four, go check the left," the tracker ahead snapped, noticing the sudden absence of footsteps behind him. He whipped around.

The moment he turned, I pulled the pin with one hand and rolled both grenades across the ground, letting the fierce wind carry them perfectly to the feet of the remaining three men.

Clink.

At the faint, metallic tap, the three men froze stiff.

"Grenade! Scat—"

BOOM!!!

The violent explosion ripped through the sandstorm, throwing up three clouds of crimson mist.

Five minutes. Four heavily armed, top-tier wasteland trackers. Wiped out.

I crouched beside the corpses, tearing a strip of cloth from their uniforms to wipe the blood off my knife.

The flawless counter-kill had defused the immediate threat, but the cloud of suspicion in my mind only grew thicker, swirling like the black sand around me.

It was too coincidental.

Even with pristine night vision goggles salvaged from the ruins, how did they lock onto us so perfectly in a Category 3 magnetic dust storm?

My three unconventional, zig-zagging evasions hadn't just avoided all visual lines of sight; I had even used the acid rain to wash away our scent trail.

Yet their first volley of machine-gun fire was so insanely accurate, it was as if they were firing guided by a live, biological radar.

This wasn't tracking.

They were being fed absolute coordinates.

An icy chill snaked up my spine.

My gaze slowly pierced through the blowing sand, settling on the crater where Gail and Marcus were hiding.

Was there... a traitor among us?

My teammates had absolutely no reason to defect to the Mayor just to spy on us. But, if a "Director" really did exist up there, then having a mole planted in this unwitting reality show of ours made terrifying sense!

I took a deep breath of the freezing wasteland air, forcing down the spine-chilling theory.

Without proof, I couldn't alert the snake in the grass.

I silently picked up two fully loaded assault rifles from the dead men, slung them over my back, and walked calmly back to our cover.

"Arthur! You're back!" Gail's eyes went raw with emotion when he saw me, his knuckles white around his scrap-shotgun.

Marcus scrambled out of the shadows as well. He pushed up his taped-together glasses, his voice trembling with praise, "That was terrifying... Arthur, even back in peaceful society, your combat skills would be top-tier. Let's go, quickly, before the sandstorm stops."

"Yeah. Grab whatever ammo you can carry." I shot them a calm, unreadable look, said nothing else, and took the lead, pushing deeper into Death Canyon.

The gale continued to rage.

Stepping over Elena and Luke's bodies, we used the storm as cover, trekking painfully through the steep, rocky walls of the canyon for over half an hour.

Up ahead, we could finally see the southern dead-end of Death Canyon.

 This was it—the rocky outcrop Luke described, where the titanium door was hidden.

We were almost there.

The truth was waiting right up ahead.

However, the very second we stepped out of the canyon's final, narrow chokepoint...

Without a single warning, a deafening SHH-CLACK tore through the night!

Three blinding, high-energy light beams—like the fiery coronas of a sun—ignited from a blind spot a few hundred meters ahead. Like three broadswords, they slashed through the dark sandstorm, pinning the three of us dead in their glare!

The light was so intense we couldn't even open our eyes. The roar of massive engines immediately followed.

Those were three heavy, weaponized off-road vehicles, parked sideways perfectly blocking off the dead end! The six-barrel Gatling guns mounted on their roofs were slowly swiveling toward us, emitting a despair-inducing mechanical whir.

They hadn't been chasing us.

They had taken a shortcut and comfortably waited at our final destination.

It was as if God himself had told them exactly where we were going.

My entire body went numb with a freezing dread—not because of the three vehicles, but because the harrowing suspicion in my heart had finally crystallized into fact.

One of the three of us... was undoubtedly a traitor!